Increased miniaturization of components, greater packaging density of integrated circuits (“ICs”), higher performance, and lower cost are ongoing goals of the computer industry. As new generations of IC products are released, the number of devices used to fabricate them tends to decrease due to advances in technology. Simultaneously, the functionality of these products increases.
Semiconductor package structures continue to advance toward miniaturization to increase the density of the components that are packaged therein while decreasing the sizes of the end products having the IC products. This is in response to continually increasing demands on information and communication apparatus for ever-reduced sizes, thicknesses, and costs, along with ever-increasing performance.
These increasing requirements for miniaturization are particularly noteworthy, for example, in portable information and communication devices such as cellular phones, hands-free cellular phone headsets, personal data assistants (“PDA's”), camcorders, notebook personal computers, and so forth. All of these devices continue to be made smaller and thinner to improve their portability. Accordingly, large-scale IC (“LSI”) packages that are incorporated into these devices are required to be made smaller and thinner, and the package configurations that house and protect them are required to be made smaller and thinner as well.
Different challenges arise from increased functionality integration and miniaturization. For example, a semiconductor product having increased functionality may be made smaller but may still be required to provide a large number of inputs/outputs (I/O) interface. The size reduction increases the I/O density for the integrated circuit package and its respective integrated circuit carriers.
The ever-increasing I/O density trend presents a myriad of manufacturing problems. Some of these problems reside integrated circuit manufacturing realm. Others problems involve mounting these increase I/O density integrated circuits on carriers for packaging. As I/O density increases, contact structures or pads on the carriers also increase in density.
Passive devices, such as surface mount resistors, capacitors, or inductors, provide simplified illustrations of the problems arising from increased I/O density. A passive device typically has two terminals and the ever-decreasing space between these terminals may be extrapolated to a higher numbers of I/Os found in integrated circuit devices. As more functionality is packed into integrated circuit packages, passive devices may also be packed into the same package.
As passive devices having reduced space between terminals, reduced terminal space and pad densities pose cleaning problems. The height and distance between the pads and terminals restrict the flow of cleaning solutions between terminals potentially leaving behind debris. Molding the passive devices having reduced terminal spacing in an integrated circuit package may leave voids between the terminals. Electrical shorts may also result from solder bridging between adjacent terminals or pads. These problems and others reduce manufacturing yields, degrade reliability, and increase cost.
Thus, a need still remains for an integrated circuit package system providing low cost manufacturing and improved yield for the integrated circuits. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.